606 MONTHLY REVIEW OF LITERATURE AND ART. 



His flesh was first lacerated with the whip, and then those small switches 

 gave him great pain. I would observe this is a very common course in 

 Jamaica ; after they have received thirty-nine or forty lashes with the whip, 

 then to use the tamarind switches : the common expression is, ' beating out 

 the bruised blood.' " 



On being asked if he had ever known an instance of a hole being dug to 

 enable the driver to place a Negro woman that was pregnant in the hole to fog 

 her ? Mr. Taylor replied, " Yes ; I was told that by the head driver of 

 Papine : in one instance he had himself inflicted the punishment. The 

 woman was pregnant, and he told his story very clearly. There was an 

 excavation made, and she was placed in it, and he flogged her with a whip, 

 and afterwards, Mr. Taylor thought, with the ebony switch. After giving 

 them the thirty-nine, they switch them." 



The Reverend Peter Duncan says, " In the year 1823 I knew of a slave 

 driver having to flog his mother. In the year 1827 or 1828 I knew of a 

 married Negress having been flogged in the presence of her fellow slaves, 

 and I believe her husband too. I asked her what had kept her from the 

 chapel. She said, she had been severely flogged ; she looked very ill ; she 

 was scarcely able to walk. I said, ' What have you done ?' She said she 

 had done nothing, but her overseer had wished her to come and sleep with 

 him. She said, * No, Massa ; I am a married woman, and I was married in 

 the Church of England on the Parade at Kingston, and I cannot do any thing 

 of the kind/ Other Negroes told me that they were present at a part of this 

 conversation, and saw Ann flogged, avowedly for that reason, and among the 

 rest her husband ; she was very severely flogged ; I was told she got about 

 fifty lashes, and was then put into the stocks. After she had remained in the 

 stocks two or three days, the overseer asked her whether she would come and 

 sleep with him yet. She said, ' No ; she was ready to do her master's duty, 

 but could not do any thing of that sort.' He brought three or four others, 

 and pointed her out by way of scorn, and said, ' This is a holy woman this 

 is a married woman ; she cannot come and sleep with me because she is a 

 Methodist, and has been married in the Church of England/ There were a 

 considerable number of Negroes with her at the time I saw her, who were 

 witnesses to the whole or part of these facts. Though I do not at present 

 recollect any other such flagrant instance of cruelty as that, it was no un- 

 common thing to me to hear that the young female slaves had been flogged 

 because they would not comply with those wishes of their overseers." 



These are a few of the blessings of that system under which the black 

 population of the West Indies is said to live cheerfully and contented ! We 

 attach no importance whatever to the statements of dukes and lords on the 

 subject : they appear to us quite as impertinent as the declarations of some of 

 the same gang respecting distress in the provinces. A fellow may well assert 

 that he has seen no squalid poverty in a district, which he has passed 

 through, lolling back in his luxurious travelling chariot, at the rate of twelve 

 miles an hour. Such worthies will never believe that want exists until their 

 wheels are impeded by human beings dying of hunger en masse on the 

 highway. 



AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



THE weather seems, at length, to exhibit some symptoms favourable to 

 change into a more mild and vernal temperature. Every circumstance rela- 

 tive to the health of men and animals, and the safety and well-doing of 

 the earth's products, renders this most desirable. A continuance of the late 

 atmospheric course into a more advanced season, would assuredly be attended 

 with most disastrous effects on all hands. Though our recollections on the 

 subject extend as far back as those of most men, we find ourselves unable to 

 adduce any period, in which insalubrious East and North winds prevailed to 



